Here’s an opinion from a gamers POV. Usually when shopping for a TV, majority of normal electronic store goers don’t exactly know what they want when they shop for a TV. They know, they don’t want something that requires signing over a limb, but they also don’t want something that looks like a spirograph when they try and watch it. For gamers in this day and age they want 2 things over all when looking for a gaming display. Quality of picture and response time.
(Response Time: The time it takes the pixel to respond to the incoming signal.)
TV’s of today are far Superior than yesterday’s CRT in the quality department. Although most don’t understand that even though today’s TV’s look 200 times better, their response time is quite the opposite case. You see CRTs don’t have “response time”, but a nearly active time display. Let’s put it in perspective, have you ever played a relatively fast moving game on an LCD screen and noticed something like when the Flash moves? Those are the little itty bitty crystals trying to rotate fast enough to display the color that’s supposed to be there at that time. CRT’s just shoot electrons into the reactive florescent screen and is nearly instant. Refresh rate is also a factor in how quick the image is displayed on screen.
Now plasma TV’s are quite different from the above too. Instead of a rotating crystal or an electron gun firing at florescent gases, you’ve got literally a little science experiment going on in your TV. Plasma’s work by having little tiny cells throughout the screen. These cells are then filled with with a mixture of gases and tiny bit of mercury. As an electron passes over the cell it affects the mercury causing it to “shed” ultraviolet protons (UV), then this reacts with phosphor that’s painted on the inside of the cell….. blah blah blah, see what I mean? Science experiment, lol. Lets just say that’s plasma TVs are quite fast, and due to not having a backlight (like LCD screens) they have much deeper blacks. So contrast is unmatched, giving you that super creepy feeling when you’re playing a horror oriented FPS (First Person Shooter) and you’re searching around in the dark. The only real problem with plasma is reliability.
It really depends on what you want to do with the overall use of your TV. If there’s a CRT that displays 1080p, I don’t know about it. Otherwise that would be the best for gaming, but since I highly doubt there is Plasma would be the best bet. Then again Plasma has on screen burns which is usually from long gaming, due to many, if not all games having a HUD (Heads Up Display). So then it leaves LCD, LED LCD and OLED LCD. Regular LCD’s quality isn’t as good as LED in my opinion and OLED is by far one of the best color displays I’ve ever seen, but unless one of these has a refresh rate compiled with a response time to be unnoticeable by the human eye I wouldn’t recommend it for gaming.
On top of all this I didn’t even factor in size, lol. Size also effects the performance of the type of TV too. So…. Still want to go shopping for a TV?